J
Jan Panteltje
ffmpeg, and if your compile a recent version of mplayer it has it too.
Novell Desktop Linux 10: getting closer to a toss up between Linux & Windows?
F
Felger Carbon
Tony Hill said:
Tony, if we ignore the display, a good corporate computer can be had
these days for no more than $600. That's in 2006 US$. At $200 a
year, that's a disposable item.
The display is disposable too, when it fails. You plug in a new one
and in five minutes you've got a good display for a few more years.
K
Keith
If that's the best analogy you can come up with, uh, it's a loser. I have
a perfectly good screwdriver that's over forty years old. I certainly
don't have a computer anywhere near that age; perhaps 1/8 that.
Since I've gone electric I rarely use manual screwdrivers for much mroe
than opening paint cans. My 12YO 12V Makita driver-drill is about at the
end of its batteries (it's been more or less replaced by a 14.4V Porter
Cable), but it still works. Batteries are too expensive so I bought a new
driver. If there is a similarity to computers, this is it. As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Yep, I have three and will likely buy at least two more this year.
Umm, you're supposed to build things with them. ;-)
So the point of your diatribe against GUIs is that some people shouldn't
be allowed to use computers? That is, if one uses a GUI one shouldn't be
*allowed* to own a computers?
So why did you do it if it hurt so much. Are you a masochist? Or are you
trying to look somehow superrior?
So you are trying to look superior. Figures.
Nice, eh?
Save money? By using ancient hardware? I don't think so!
If it hurts, stop doing it.
A bit of hyperbole, no?
You didn't read what Tony wrote, did you?
The $100 laptop will get here when there is a government somewhere willing
to subsidize the other $400.
Sure, they're really good at opening paint cans too.
BS. That $100 laptop (that really cost $600) will still be powerful
enough to make the GUI just responsive as a command line. You were
simply born fifty years too late.
Whoopie! You do know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, right? BTW,
my K6-III is still running fine too. I've never had a hard disk die
either (even the DeskStar 75GXP in the K6-III is still a happy camper),
but I don't extrapolate that "data" to the general case.
Ah, the hardware is perfect. Never fails. That's good to know.
What?! "Girls in the office typing"? What drugs *are* you on?
Secretaries are so '70s.
Ah, so that's why IBM only has a revenue of $100B/yr. Businesses don't
need new/fast/reliable servers. I'm glad you cleared that up! [good thing
I own no IBM stock]
That's why you spend $400 on a newer/faster system. ...or don't.
You need to polish your aluminum foil.
Even the electricity needed to run a P4 3.2GHz processor (who in their
right mind would go there?) is insignificant compared to the time an
employee takes a washroom break. ...or do you want to ban flush toilets
too?
K
Keith
Agreed, but the tax man has other ideas (they're still capital items). By
the time it's failed you've wasted more money than the thing is worth.
Replace them *before* failure (helps with data integrity too). I was
recently "forced" to give up my 5YO A21p, but did manage to hold out for a
T42p. Our nominal laptop replacement cycle is 4 years (I told them to go
away for a year).
Sure, but waiting for the new one is expensive (unproductive). Many
corporations even replace lightbulbs on a schedule. It's cheaper than
waiting for them to fail and doing it onsey-twosy.
K
Keith
Command not found.
Stick your holly-than-thou. The fscking GUI works and it's not much of
a burden on an Opteron.
G
Gnu.Raiz
Keith said:
What else are we going to use the second core on all those dual core
systems if it was not for the GUI.
Getting back to what Tony, and others have said, the other day I was
reading on RootPrompt a story about the life of a Unix IT person. In it
it describes the thinking of some coporations. I really thought it was
insightful, and shows just how much waste some companies are going for.
Wasn't it a few years ago that Nvidia was hyping their Nforce2 systems
as a good source for businesses? They showed how an image of the hard
drive could be installed on a system after a hardware failure. All this
was to reduce the cost of support, it would seem that the role of IT
staff has changed. No wonder a lot of companies are out sourcing
support, as these dudes won't do the job of their forebearers. Someone
needs to do a TCO study of the IT staff who have these contracts
compared to those who do not. I guess one could always subcontract all
the work to IBM, or some other big company.
I do find it strange that the Microsoft is now trying to get more Unix
like in their server products. How they have decided to invest so much
in the cmd line tools for those products. What we have here is a
conundrum, Gnu/linux is getting more Windows like, while Windows is
getting more Gnu/Linux like!
Then heaven forbid you have to factor in the Apple factor, and their
human interactivity studies. I do think that education is a factor,
lets face it so many people are use to how Windows works, with the
start menu, and placement of menu's that changing to a new system is
hard for them. Some people get upset at the placement of their icon's,
just take the Windows XP vs, classic look. Some people hate it, and
only use one or the other.
One thing is for sure I see that DRM will play a big part in the next
few years. I think that Gnu/Linux will be a big winner on this front.
If its easier for people to work on files and permission's with
Gnu/Linux then Vista, then it could be a good thing for Open Source.
Gnu_Raiz
F
Felger Carbon
Keith said:
What do you mean, _wait_ for the new one? When the light bulb burns
out, does your corporation place a purchase order or does it get a new
one from stock? ;-)
K
Keith
Pretty much. I gotta fill out an eForm (in the dark) and wait for a
contractor to be dispatched from who_knows.where to come turn on my
lights. In those hours->days I'm without light. If this dim-bulb were my
computer it would be costing them somwhere upwards of a grand/day while I
sat there in my eDarkness. Even my cheap-ass employer realizes this isn't
a good thing.
K
Keith
Good point. I'd rather have a second machine (I did for years) to do the
real work. In a way I still do. The real works gets sent off to
cycle-servers, somewhere.
Explain. Much of what you might think of as "waste" isnt'. As Tony
pointed out, there isn't much of anythign more expensive tham people. It
doesn't take much productivity to justify several kilobux worth of
hardware, particularly when it's amortized over a few years. Lynn
Wheeler, over on .folklore, tells about justifyin 3277 terminals for IBM
engineers in the '70s. His study showed that it cost about the same as
the phone on the desk when all was said and done. Funny, we had to share
phones then, but had our own 3277s with Tektronix graphics attachments. ;-)
Companies do *not* want to do a real TCO study. They d/won't like the
answer.
Market, m'boy, market. Unlike Jan, I have no interest in learning the
guts of the command line for every little thing I might do once or twice
in a month. I want the GUI aids there (my job isn't managing my system).
If Linix does 80% of what I want, good enough. I have an old relic to do
the other 20%.
Apple has lost some of its attttraction for me recently. ;-) Seriously,
they have a good niche. One that Linux could expand upon. Hardware is
still the problem (Apple limits this problem by limiting hardware).
I agree it's a huge problem, one that mighteven sink the PC market, IMO.
OTOH, I don't see how Linux is going to get around this, unless you're
talking about rogues "stealing" content (I do consider "sharing" to be
*stealing*, but not viewing what *I* have paid for).
J
Jan Panteltje
mm so, i have read your usual critism of WORLD and will as I please
air some of my own.
So 40 year old, no money to buy a nice new one?
But you do not do electronics obviously, or ever tried to fix a watch..
You know these nice instrument screwdrivers....
Bus driver?????
Nope, wrong again....
Screwdrivers are long and thin, computers are big boxes.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)
You want ??YOU?? want to look superior, not me, problem with you Keith
is that you are a little screamer with too much money and opinion and too
little knowledge where it counts.
We all already figured that out from your previous replies.
Have you ever written an OS Keith, no you have not.
How many applications do you have out there for Linux as GPL Keith?
Howe many of those did you have to do user support for for let's just say
BSD Linux Suse, redhat, Debian Mandrake and quite a few other Keith?
I'd say come and talk again when you have.
As to you using 'a' PC that needs 64 bit ?? to do some job faster, sure,
there are (for example technical) cases (for example running a FPGA
syntesize) where that would be nice.
Specially when you are really bad at it and need to do it 30 times to
get it right.
But that is NOT the normal 'office' job.
Last time I delivered a 'turn key' system (running Linux) I spend 2 days
instructing the users... Had one phone call and one telnet session to
remotely fix a problem....
Yes there is a GUI, but all they use it for is scripted, with menus,
applications written with xforms, small fast and GPL.
No overhead.
And to explain how to use fvwm with 8 xterms took an hour.
And solved ........ help desk calls....
You need to learn people to do the right thing.
You should NOT addict people to the wrong thing, then they are always
depending on YOU.
And this is what I mend by 'customer binding, 'market protection'.
LEARN people the basics of Unix, and they can fly.
Learn them how to click on a GUI and they STILL have no clue after 15 years
what they are actually doing or what a computer or processor is.
To teach them Unix is not a really big job, it is in essence simple.
But those who build sand castles on it, and teach people sand castles -those
should know- when the sea comes in, all will be of the past.
I personally believe in the sanity of people as far as they have not been
misinformed by others...the GUI has become a religion... for them.
I hope you can see that when you have 6000 commands that it makes no sense
to have an icon on the desktop for each one, or have a pulldown memory
structure to access these n a normal size normal resolution screen.
GUI is nice for some stuff, but think, our language has thousands of words.
Most of the time you know what you want 'pizza, cola, car, house, yes
even electric screwdriver, sex, money, etc etc,' so let's make a menu.
Now we want a submenu for pizza pepperoni, fungi, salami etc...
I hope you with your superior intellect can see that it is so much simpler
to USE THE LANGUAGE WE ALREADY HAVE (caps are free on my PC BTW) and say:
pizza mozzarella.
And here it pops up.
Of course that expect you to have leaned reading and writing, know pizza
types... and thus probably excludes large parts of the world, but those
would not be using the PC anyways but chasing rabbits in the wild... so
for the rest it is faster then a GUI -either via icons or menus-.
I wanted to run xmenuconfig to compile the new kernel, it told me it could
not find Qt, so I downloaded the latest, compiled it and found xmenuconfig
now is broken as it only supports the older Qt 3.something.
This is the way we learn.
I also ran the Qt demos to see what sort of new thing all this bloat added,
and nothing NOTHING referring to the above new.. and imagemagick does all
that too I think.
I can point out that I was doing special effects on a K6 in video when
it simply was not available anywhere else in Linux, so yes some code was
written by me. Where is yours? I am just stating facts.
Since when is GUI or xterm hardware related? get a clue.
Nope, exactly the way it is.
Soft and hardware industry support each other .. aided by a large legion of
'have no clue' sales people who will sell you that octal core hyperon for
email.
It will not be made in the US but looks like Taiwan now.
They will make profit at 100$
As agreed earlier Keith is a special case.
We will never agree on anything likely, probably even on the fact that we
will never agree.
How can one disagree with that?
Keith will tell us ;-)
J
Jan Panteltje
So no mplayer in suse-10.X???
I have it removed now, but the disk still here....
If it was true (did you install it with all addons?) then it just PROVES suse-10 is a monster,
even the most basic grml ( www.grml.org ) comes with the latest mplayer, and that is only one *CD* image,
not 6 CD like suse.
So maybe you need to upgrade Keith ;-)??
K
Keith
By my guest. You will, umm, air out your dirty laundry anyway.
Oh, I have probably fifty screwdrivers of all varieties. I don't use them
much though.
I do quite a bit of electronics (it's my profession - hardware engineer)
and no, I don'e even own a watch. I can't wear them, so there is no
point.
Wow, you are stupid. Screw, perhaps?
What a maroon!
Try supporting a 1,000 (or 100,000) employees with your junkbox parts.
Nope, just pointing out that there are tools for every job. If you want
to do the job, buy the tool.
Yes, *you*.
Really? From you, that's quite a compliment! Naw, you looked in the
mirror and got scared. Pneumatic hammers do things that are quite
difficult to do with standard hammers (thought I have several of them
too). You don't see professionals swinging hammers much anymore.
You got a mouse in your pocket? ....what a maroon!
I'm not a programmer and never want to be. I'm a hardware developer.
Software is only there to sell hardware.
....and writing yet another newsreader (that only one person
on the planet uses) is? Like it or not, command-line doesn't make it in
the "normal 'office'".
Ah, so even you write GUIs that you hate so much. Why is that? Perhaps
because they're needed?
Such a Europeon attitude; "I know what's good for you, better than you."
In most cases they don't care or want to know what is happening under the
covers. The typical office worker shouldn't care what's going on under
the GUI. I don't really want to know. I just want it to do what I told
it to do.
Please. TO a non-technical person it's an insurmountable learning curve.
I'm a technical type and really don't want to know. Just do what I want.
....and a contorted command line and *IX is your religion. So be it. If
you want to sell to them, better supply what they want. ...and that is
*NOT* Unix instruction.
If you have 6000 commands that need to be mastered to use your software
you have a far larger problem than rearranging deck chairs.
Good idea. I don't want to have to remember esdxwr -lg 6 -tp
plps_2 to reach into my toolbox for a #2 phillips tip on my electric
driver.
No, I don't. Ever notice that the keys on McDonald's cash register
have no letters or numbers, only pictures of food? You supply the
tools a customer wants.
The simple *fact* is that a GUI is faster for tasks that aren't done every
day. Frankly, I don't have the time to learn a new command line and
hundreds of switches for every tool I use. When forced into command
line (when a GUI isn't available or is particularly horrid) I end up
writing a one-line script for every variation I'll likely use. Then it's
"only" a matter of remembering which one does what I wanted to do. This
is *not* better than a usable GUI.
<snip - no more time>
K
Keith
No it proves nothing, since I'm not using 10.0.
One DVD.
I may upgrade to SuSE 10.0, though I have unanswered questions (some
asked here) to satisfy before I spend the time.
G
George Macdonald
Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.
Unfortunately the vast majority of "normal 'office' job" is tied to use of
M$ apps, file formats and data base storage. Live with it.
Good luck selling your "turn key" system (do you really know what that
means ?) to a corp which is "standardized" on M$ applications and formats
with SQL Server and wants a Web-based interface.
What utter bullshit.
Add me to the list and, judging by your other comments on teaching the
world 6000 Unix commands, everybody is out of step except for you. Ye'r
pissin' into the wind son - ye'r gonna get wet and ye'll smell bad.
J
Jan Panteltje
Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be
J
Jan Panteltje
Hey I agree with a lot of this.
As for Mc Donalds do you think you can get them to upgrade the cash registers
to more expensive ones with 3D moving burgers?
Is not that what Billy The Gates wants to sell next?
And of cause customer will have to sign a 'will not copy hamburger' slip each
time (DRM).
And pass a fingerprint ID test.
Yes, in the case -in fact in many cases- there are only a few choices, and
those icons for salad etc shakes are likely just scripted too.
Yes that is turn key.
So you are a hardware developer, well so am I.
I am a software developer too.
Your chance to learn something.
Actually a hardware developer at least in this world I live in, needs to be
able to write in many asm languages, C, C++ perhaps plus some scripting.
The turnkey I was talking about is selling electronics controlled by PCs
running yes: Linux.
So I take it then that your are a IC layout jockey, yes that is hardware,
but a small small part of it all.
I only have some FPGA experience, not with chip layout stuff at all.
So .. and the physics of that is also beyond me.
I can live with that.
J
Jan Panteltje
I have 9.3 (think it is) .
mplayer is at:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html
I am pretty sure suse-9.3 has mplayer (find and install via yast perhaps)
whereis mplayer
or
locate mplayer
or
apropos mplayer
or
man mplayer
or type
mplayer
But if not get the latest one 9and ffmpeg) from the above lionk.
The other good player is xine,
www.xine.org.
T
Tony Hill
There's nothing wrong with using the right tool for the right
application, and that's just the point. Why should someone limit
themselves to not using a GUI just because they have really outdated
hardware that is costing more money then replacing it would?
A Duron 950 is a rather outdated system these days (probably around 5
years old). You might be fine using it at home or in a small business
if you're doing all your own IT work, but in a business where you need
to pay for IT systems of that era would cost you an arm and a leg to
support as compared to buying new systems.
So why the heck did you upgrade?! I'm not advocating upgrading for
the sake of upgrading, I'm saying that people shouldn't be limiting
themselves to old applications due to the capabilities of their PC
when a newer one will add capabilities that will make them more
productive.
No, you need a system that is covered under a warranty because support
costs for desktop PCs are roughly 3-5 times as much as their upfront
purchase cost.
If that's what you like then fine, but you have to realize that you're
ALWAYS going to be a VERY small minority. For the VAST majority
(read: 99%) of the world, this is going to be MUCH less efficient then
going through a GUI to find what they want most of the time. Only a
few crazy masochists are going to even try to learn even a fraction of
what all those applications are going to do, so spending the time
searching through the man pages to figure out what they need is not an
efficient use of time.
T
Tony Hill
Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be
In a company of more than ~10 people, yes you DO need some form of 'IT
infrastructure' to replace a mouse. Or do you want your employees to
spend their working hours driving to the store to buy the mouse
themselves? Many employees could easily be costing the company $100
to go to the store just to pick up a mouse because theirs went bad.
And that's your best-case scenario. What happens when a power supply
or motherboard goes bad on your out-of-warranty computer?
You might not need a BIG IT department, it could well be just one
person that does this as only part of their job, but in anything other
then the smallest of small companies you need SOME kind of IT group.
G
George Macdonald
Yep, and even for the "bad" mouse, it might just be a symptom: could be
that some idiot unplugged a PS/2 and replugged with the power on and blew
the interface or mbrd fuse; I've also seen where a hamfisted user buggered
the mbrd mouse socket by forcing it - 10mins poking around with a push-pin
umm, fixed it.
Just last week I had a server which was hanging because the chipset fan was
stalling and replacements are impossible to find retail -- a 30mm buried
frame fan?.. d'oh -- FWIW MSI sent me three new heatsink/fans just based on
an e-mail with serial #s mentioned... and this is supposed to be a
"part-time occupation".
The current fad seems to be outsourcing but I wonder about that - I've
heard some horror stories and eventually it can still pay to have someone
who knows details of the local network/computing infrastructure.